The Real Is Unknowable, the Knowable Is UnrealFrom "The Real Is Unknowable, the Knowable Is Unreal" by Robert Powell

Wisdom is to reject conventional wisdom about almost everything.

Like the man who does not realize how dangerous driving actually is, and thus is a danger to himself and others, so a man who does not understand thinking really is a dangerous person. Because thinking lies away from reality and is always a projection from the unreal, it is no more than a dream. The non-stirring of the dream is peace and bliss.

Time is an invention, a creation of the mind. During dreamless sleep, time does not exist. Thus, one may wake from deep sleep lasting only a couple of hours and feel one has slept the entire night. In dreams, there is time because the mind is active, but it is different from that experienced during the waking state. Even in the waking state, during pure perception without mentation of any kind, a state exists without time.
Likewise, during deep sleep, space does not exist. But in the waking and dream states, space is created by the activities of the sense organs and the brain.

Does the body actually exist? We perceive the body with the senses, but the senses are part of the body themselves. What this amounts to is that the body says that the body exists. Its testimony is immediately suspect, tantamount to taking at face value the statement of the thief that he is honest.

Ultimately, we can say only that there are sensate impressions (being perceived by the senses). But what is the meaning of that? How can this statement be further reduced in terms of ultimate reality? It cannot. All statements about reality are void. This is the beginning of seeing into Emptiness, the beginning of true wisdom.

In true advaita, or non-duality, there is no denial of the existence of good and evil. These are considered inherently and necessarily co-existent with the Universe, the mind, space-time. As is stated so succinctly in the Ashtavakra Gita, “The Universe is merely a mode of the mind; in reality it has no existence.” Just as in a dream we are emoted by all kinds of things which upon awakening are seen to be products of a restless mind, so upon awakening to our real condition, we understand that our waking state experiences are equally the products of a dream factory and that in the Absolute none of these things exists. Thus, the only way of coming to terms with “evil,” and participating in the Bliss that is our birthright is by transcending the limitations of body, mind, and world.

Reality can never give rise to unreality, since what flows from existence will inevitably be in the realm of existence. But the alternative does not add up either, for what is illusory or non-existent cannot give rise to Existence or to anything for that matter: A fruitful example of the use of Reason in Vichara (spiritual inquiry)!

Body perception gives rise to a framework in space and time that drives and motivates all our thoughts and actions. This total mechanism is nothing but what we call “mind”—basically a concept, kept alive artificially through repeated false vision and self-misunderstanding.
To pierce our suffocating illusion, we should see “body” as nothing but an easy way of speaking, a thought construct. We perceive “body” as such because we assign limits or boundaries to it in space and time. These boundaries have been assigned by the sense organs, which are themselves part of the body whose real existence has yet to be proved. So the whole thing is an exercise in begging the question—a circular argument!

All that we really are is an “idea,” everything that we think to have “existence”—i.e., independent existence— is only a concept, a creation of the mind.

Most of us like to have some “temporary immortality” to temporarily negate our ideation or “ideological” reality. We constantly negate the fact that our being is a mere idea. Because once I accept or confirm my existence as mere idea, where am I? Nowhere at all. I am a nothingness, however, that rests on the solid basis of consciousness.

Once I have understood conclusively that the self is no longer that exclusive structure of flesh and bone that I had habitually called “I” or “me,” then I am free from any idea of differentiation in and of reality. I look into this boundless Emptiness, which is at once the Plenitude. This is advaita—the insight into the true nature of what is.

When you use that word “I,” what’s the first thing you think of? The “body.” Do not say “your” body. because that is the fundamental first mistake from which all others follow.
Fundamentally, our thinking revolves around that “I” imagination or projection. Where is thought, without the latter?
Without the “body,” which “I” have projected, where is the world, and where is the mind? Truly, there is only Consciousness!

Everything is but Imagination, and that is the only Truth . . . fully grasping this signifies the end of logic.

The truth about the meaning of life is that there is none, just as the mind that would postulate it, as well as space and time, are all non-existent.

Death can exist only in the world of form. And form itself is non-existent; it is a kind of waste product of the brain/nervous system, which itself is also part of the exudent.

Tragically, we have built the whole of Existence upon our perception of the entity designated as “I” or “self.”
The idea of “body” comes about through integrated sense data, which in turn are physical reactions to stimuli. The latter only register because of the underlying substratum called “mind.” In its absence, they would not be able to manifest, just as in the sleep state, there is no registration of anything happening around us.

People are concerned with the injustice of “when bad things happen to good people.” But what about “when good things happen to bad people”? The former affirms our usual dualistic mode of functioning (good always gets rewarded or should be). Questioning this world outlook could be the starting point of a non-dualistic or advaitic realization.

What is man, if he is not that “I-am-ness” bundle of concepts and images, which has come upon him at birth? Either he is the Consciousness or Absolute, or he is the total negation of Reality. There is no reason that the state after death should not be identical to the state before birth. If man were essentially nihil, totally non-existent, then the manifest state of body-mind could not have arisen. Therefore, what one is, the Self, is the eternal Consciousness, the Unmanifest, which brings forth the “I-am-ness,” space-time, and the entire world or worlds.

The state beyond sleeping and waking, beyond life and death, is “Consciousness.”
The state beyond “you” and “me” is not It. It is termed “Consciousness.” Nisargadatta Maharaj uses the term “beingness,” but stresses this is still a precursor to the Ultimate state.

The majority of people in this world confess to a belief in the existence of a God of some kind. But is this any wonder, considering that they themselves have created this concept in the first place, and then have added this term to their vocabulary?

Once again it must be stated that it is so much easier to repeat and accept something one has heard than to question everything regardless of its source. Our propensity in this direction is constantly exploited in the areas of religion and politics.

Truth depends on a frame of reference, reality does not.

The senses advise us of the presence of a (or “the”) world. But the senses themselves are part of this world, so such advice is useless, as we are merely engaged in a circular argument.

What is the Self and what is Consciousness? There is a special difficulty analyzing these particular terms and fully comprehending them in meaning and ultimate validity. This is simply due to the fact that every term in our language represents a concept or abstraction. The Self or Consciousness forms the sole exception. The truth of the matter is that even the word “comprehending” does not apply here, since it is entirely a question of realizing—that is, sharing its reality, becoming one with it, not having a conceptual relationship with it. We are dealing with the fact that every subject can be seen as comprising a subject and an object, since the subject itself can be viewed further as an object to a second observer-subject.

People who look superficially at the teaching of Nisargadatta Maharaj may observe that it is apparently very close to that of the materialists who posit that matter produces consciousness just as the liver produces bile. But it is equally true that the body is the product of consciousness, it being a mental reflection, an apparition that comes and goes in consciousness and can therefore be nothing but consciousness. Without consciousness, where is the body? Without Consciousness, as in deep sleep, where is the world, where is anything at all? It is much like a chicken-and-egg type of proposition.

Both the body and the mind have a deeper foundation, a substratum, from which both arise and into which both return, in an ever-recurring cycle. That substratum is the Absolute, which itself is not affected by time.

Man is everlastingly talking about reaching out to the Supreme, but has forgotten that he himself has projected this Godhead or Supreme in the first place. Through thinking, observing, and meditating, we hope to acquire knowledge of our fundamental nature, thereby forgetting the basic parameters of our being, through which we aim to acquire this transcendental knowledge. All knowledge gathered in these efforts is ultimately based on sensory perception.

The bodily senses are said to constitute a window on the world. The question, however, is whether the senses (i.e., the body) are separate from the world. In order to provide valid knowledge, the instrument for knowing has to be separate from that which it wishes to know, to understand. And not only separate but also greater and more fundamental in scope. Only in the latter case will the knowledge acquired have any relevance, any meaning. The ocean can know an ocean droplet, but the latter will never have an inkling of the nature of the ocean.
Since the senses are no other than the body, we are actually talking about a cyclic process: the soma pronouncing on the soma, and even expressing itself in terms of the soma—clearly a circular process and paradox. The organs of perception and any conceptions based on their findings are completely useless in grasping the fundamental nature of oneSelf! These findings will ever be fragmentary and incapable of knowing the Whole, one’s real identity, the Self.

The cultivation of the life of desire and satisfaction drains our vital energy and keeps us bound to the false image of the body. In itself satisfaction is not wrong, but exclusively living for satisfying desires, whether bodily or mentally, keeps us in bondage and strengthens the illusion that we are this bundle of thoughts and concepts. Since the ego is a process that consumes nervous energy in order to set itself apart from the rest of the universe, every time we engage in the desire-satisfaction game we drain away valuable energy and postpone the moment of our eventual emancipation. Unlike other members of the animal kingdom, we have a superior brain stem, which has actually put us at a disadvantage in this respect.

If indeed the world has come about as if by magic, how can anyone take that world seriously? And how can anyone rationally cling to that apparition?
Our functioning in the world is as a body-mind entity, and takes place within innumerable frames of reference, each of which contains relationships that are valid within a particular frame of reference. These frames of reference are our worldly relationships, relationships of relative truths. Individually, these frames of reference have significance with respect to each other, but collectively their value is void, not being grounded anywhere. They are like clouds in the sky or images in a dream.

The Indian teacher Sri Atmananda once stated that the existence of dreams is a real blessing because it grants us the possibility of contemplating the waking life as nothing but a dream. If the waking state were all we ever knew, then the idea of our existence being a mere dream could never have arisen. The waking state would have solidified our prevalent dualistic worldview.

Is it not amazing, this cycle of knowing and unknowing, and their ultimate unification? One begins by not-knowing anything—avidya—participating in the cycle of samskara, under the light of Ignorance, with the idea that there is something to know. One is compelled to proceed in this way, and eventually ends up at one’s starting point, namely that one does not know, but this time with a slight, or perhaps huge, difference—depending on one’s point of view: the realization that there is neither knowledge nor anything to know. Thus, one starts off being an ordinary agnostic, and ends up as a very special type of agnostic—one who does not know but also, and more importantly, one who knows very clearly that there is absolutely nothing to know because even the idea of there being any one thing is erroneous.

Science is reputed to give us facts only, nothing as speculative as conjectures. But in actual fact what it gives us only are correlations, where the correlates are further conjectures.

To see the usefulness of everything is knowledge. To see the uselessness of everything is wisdom.

Brahman, i.e. the Absolute, Consciousness, or the Self—whatever one wishes to call it—is to be known only through non-dualistic ways of knowing—which is actually “knowledge transcended.” Can one still speak of “knowing” in this connection? And Maya can never be "explained," mainly because that which is giving the explanation is in itself Maya! When the proverbial “flatlander” tries to explain his world, it is always in terms of his unrecognized handicap, his restricted two-dimensional perspective, and therefore sadly unaware of the real three-dimensional world around him!

Brahman is uncreate, for the simple reason that creation could only be a projection by the mind, and would necessitate a preceding state of absolute Nothingness. Such an absolute state of Nothingness would be logically irreconcilable with the notion of “creation,” for by definition no “event” could take place in it. Also, a created Brahman would imply a beginning point and therefore its involvement with space-time, which is Maya. That would mean that Brahman would be dependent on Maya for its being, when in fact the exact opposite is true. Brahman as the sole unchanging reality, could not be Brahman, by definition, if it rested upon space-time.

Even on the semantic level alone, the term “agnostic” has a certain significance. For when we use this term, we imply the opposite of our natural default condition. Semantically, there is no appropriate term for the latter’s condition, for “Gnostic” has a very specific, sectarian meaning that has no relevance in this context. We postulate that “knowing’ is our natural way of being, with its tremendous tableau of imagery. Immediately a certain value judgment is implied, which fundamentally shapes our entire being! We have loaded up on an enormous amount of mental baggage that henceforth conditions and oppresses us as inherently free human beings.
The moral is: Neither an agnostic nor its opposite be! Be your full capacity, be the Self only!

The popular saying is “Seeing is believing.” For me, seeing is neither believing nor disbelieving, neither accepting nor rejecting, but an immediate knowing that needs no corroboration.

Who is that “me”? It is nothing but a false continuity—a memory of identification with the bodily senses, stretched out in time.

Can we realize or imagine a Reality in which there is the absence of Self or of Consciousness?
To understand anything, one should be able to look at it dispassionately or objectively. Here, there is no question of doing that. Since we are the Self, the Consciousness ItSelf, what is there with which to look at It objectively? Could there be anything with which to look at the Consciousness? No, of course not. There is only That, which we are ourselves, the ultimate Subject.

All thought is essentially Imagination and therefore dangerous to one’s spiritual health.

Although we have the impression that we are born into a universe of time and space, the reality is actually the opposite: we ourselves project both time and space; that is, we “individualize” ourselves. The “individual” is in her true state only when dreamlessly asleep. On waking up (physiologically, that is) a certain "stirring" takes place, setting off a dream in which one imagines there are “others” who are contemporaries, who have lived before, and who will live after us. One further elaborates upon this condition with various theories of reincarnation and biological and spiritual evolution, all based upon an erroneous concept of time. One is totally unaware that within a “person’s” life, all “others” are included, and the latter exist—that is, they are born and die—only to the extent that they represent their own consciousness.

Interestingly, “history,” in its entirety, is always now; His-story is ever My-story. Another way to see this is that he and I are not actually separate; they both are only the Self or Consciousness. In non-duality, the physical act of perception remains the same as in duality, but its meaning is fundamentally altered.

True spirituality is knowing the difference between things happening to “me,” with their attendant pain and pleasure, and things just happening, with their attendant bliss.

We have taken so many things for granted in the spiritual life and the search for our real identity. In the first place, I have a serious doubt about the validity of using the mind in the search for self-realization. In this endeavor, are we not limited by the mind’s circumference—that is, its innate limitations? It is important to realize that the only instrument available for investigation is the mind. But, unfortunately, its energy is wasted on the creation of an infinite web of thought.
Much spiritual effort has been misdirected toward the pruning of thought, the cultivation of goodness, and more generally the substitution of one set of desires for another. The teachings of Ramana Maharshi point the attention directly to the “thinker,” to the originator of this world of thought. Self-enquiry, with its focus on the individual or the subject, takes one away from looking without—away from the realm of thought, from the ever-moving waves to the ever-still vastness of the ocean. The effort we speak of here is to hold on to the “I am,” the core of one’s being. Effort as a continual redirection of the attention is needed so long as we do not have a firm hold on the “I am.” This is quite different from what we usually understand by the term “effort,” which is the direction of thought in a particular direction. The question then arises: how do we know whether our attention is firm, or the mind is slipping back into its old thought patterns? If thought subsides while we are fully awake, we have held the attention on “I.” When thoughts re-emerge, it means that our attention has strayed and the mind has returned to its usual pattern of activity.

It is a curious situation that the two parameters upon which we most depend in determining our identity—the body and the mind—are treacherously unreliable and deceptive. Each cannot stand alone without the other, so neither can exist as independently real: The body depends for its definition and determination upon the mind, and the mind in turn depends for its definition and expression on the body!
The two pillars upon which we had depended for understanding and expression of our identity appear to be non-existent. We are forced to conclude that our identity lies mysteriously far away from body-mind and is therefore simply ineligible for expression as such. The most important conclusion that we can draw from this situation is that what we are is irreducible to being an entity of any kind, and that this—the Infinite—can never be defined as mere concept or in terms of the known. Such is the inscrutable nature of our Self.

Spirituality is nothing other than clearing all cobwebs from one’s mind, and the final realization that the mind itself is nothing but a cobweb too, obscuring the Self.

To discover the reality of Self, it is crucial to discover that the composite of body and mind (and/or consciousness) is not just floating in an ocean of nothingness, the Void. If the latter were the case, one would verily and solely be that body-mind entity, and there would be some justification for the ruling materialistic outlook of society.
The non-local and non-locatable nature of body-mind implies that body-mind per se has no independent existence from the Void. I cannot define the entity without invoking the nature of the Void, since I am the Void, the Totality, the Self. Body or mind cannot be defined in terms of itself; it needs the mind or consciousness to do so. And consciousness is obviously in itself non-local and non-locatable; it is only matter that can be thusly defined. Hence, what we are in essence is beyond any form of identification or definition. This entire insight is represented by that code word, the “ Self.”

Perhaps our greatest danger, our greatest hindrance, in understanding ourSelves in what is real, is to stipulate that non-existence is real. In fact, true non-existence does not exist; it is a mere facet of our imagination. The antithesis, existence versus non-existence (life versus death), is a projection by the mind. Self exists unqualifiedly—beyond space and time. Generally, we do not “get” this because we live by, in, and for, the mind.

Until there is not the slightest contact left with the world of thought and materiality, not even the tiniest speck, there will be fear of death. The realization must dawn that what we are in essence is spaceless and timeless, not to be confined within any form or tangibility. When the illusory appearance disappears, we manifest as the unchangeable purity of the Self.

At some point in one’s inquiry one will inevitably arrive at the mind-blowing insight that the consciousness that explores the nature of the Totality or Consciousness is itself also that Consciousness! Full realization of this fact—even for one thousandth of a second—gives one sufficient pause to call off the search: “Thou Art That.”